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<\/a>Stop Letting Israel\u2019s Enemies Write the Dictionary<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h3>\nDavid E. Firester<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n When people chant \u201cFrom the river to the sea,\u201d they pair it with familiar phrases: \u201cPalestinian\u201d land, \u201coccupied Palestinian territories,\u201d \u201cindigenous Palestinians,\u201d and \u201csettler-colonial Jews.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Most people argue about the slogans and maps. Far fewer ask a prior question: Who wrote the dictionary that makes those slogans sound plausible?<\/span><\/p>\n For decades, Israel\u2019s enemies have understood something many Jews and Israel-supporters have missed: if you control the language, you control the story. Define the key terms and you can turn an ancient indigenous people into supposed foreign invaders and recast repeated wars of annihilation against Israel as \u201canti-colonial resistance.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n To say that \u201cPalestinian\u201d is a political brand is not to deny that there are real Arabic-speaking people who today live under that name. The question is how<\/em> this identity was framed and to what end.<\/span><\/p>\n During the latter half of the 20th century, \u201cPalestinian\u201d was carefully positioned as the indigenous victim of Zionist \u201cintruders,\u201d even though the Jewish people\u2019s presence in the Land of Israel predates Islam, Arab nationalism, and the modern state system by millennia.<\/span><\/p>\n For centuries, under various empires, Jews and Arabs lived in the broader region that Europeans later (and briefly) called \u201cPalestine.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n There was no sovereign \u201cPalestinian\u201d state and no distinct \u201cPalestinian\u201d nationality in the modern sense. Those constructs were shaped in the mid-20th century as part of a strategy to turn repeated Arab attempts to destroy the Jewish State into a moral story of dispossession.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cPalestinian\u201d was not simply discovered; it was branded, a label that let Arab leaders and their allies invert reality: the side that tried, again and again, to wipe out the Jews of Israel would now be cast as the timeless victim of \u201cforeign\u201d Jews who supposedly have no home there at all.<\/span><\/p>\n The phrase \u201coccupied Palestinian territories\u201d flows off the tongue so easily that people rarely ask what it means.<\/span><\/p>\n Before 1967, Judea and Samaria were annexed by Jordan, and the Gaza Strip was under Egyptian control. Neither Arab state created a sovereign \u201cPalestinian\u201d entity there.<\/span><\/p>\n Before that, the area was \u201cowned\u201d by the British Mandate, and before that, the Ottoman Empire. There has never been an independent \u201cPalestinian\u201d state whose recognized sovereign territory Israel is supposedly occupying.<\/span><\/p>\n Yet by repeating \u201coccupied Palestinian territories,\u201d these activists import a package deal: that there once was a \u201cPalestinian\u201d state; that the land in question is inherently and exclusively \u201cPalestinian,\u201d despite its deep Jewish history; and that Israel\u2019s presence there is automatically illegal, regardless of how it came about or what the real legal debates are.<\/span><\/p>\n The phrase \u201coccupied Palestinian territories\u201d is not neutral; it is a weapon. It erases Jewish indigeneity to places whose Hebrew names \u2014 Judea and Samaria \u2014 tell their own story. It suggests that Jews crossing an invisible line on the western bank of the Jordan River are \u201csettlers,\u201d while Arabs are always \u201cnatives,\u201d no matter when their families arrived. On campus and in much of the media, this vocabulary is treated as settled fact. But that\u2019s not truth \u2014 it\u2019s narrative.<\/span><\/p>\n Weaponized language does not stay confined to UN resolutions or academic journals. It shapes how ordinary people think and feel. When a student hears, year after year, that Israel is a \u201csettler-colonial\u201d project oppressing \u201cindigenous Palestinians,\u201d he or she is being given a moral script: Jews are the guilty party; Arab violence is an understandable reaction to \u201coccupation\u201d; and terrorism against Jews is justified \u201cresistance.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n So what can be done? We cannot force hostile actors to abandon terms that serve their agenda. But we can stop doing their work for them.<\/span><\/p>\n First, we must recognize that words like \u201cPalestinian,\u201d \u201coccupation,\u201d and \u201csettler-colonialism\u201d are not neutral. They come packaged with stories about history, power, and morality. If those stories are false or one-sided, we have a responsibility to say so.<\/span><\/p>\n Second, we should speak accurately about the land itself. Instead of reflexively saying \u201cWest Bank,\u201d we can talk about Judea and Samaria, or at least about disputed territories captured in a defensive war, rather than \u201coccupied Palestinian territories.\u201d Rather than treating \u201cPalestinian\u201d as a synonym for indigeneity, we can speak of Arab residents of Judea and Samaria and Arab Israelis, alongside Jewish communities with deep roots there. Third, we should unapologetically affirm Jewish indigeneity. Jews are not recent \u201cEuropean imports\u201d into the Middle East. Our ancestral language, scriptures, and rituals are woven into the geography of Israel itself. The burden of proof should not rest on Jews to justify their presence in Jerusalem, Hebron, or Shiloh.<\/span><\/p>\n Finally, communal leaders, journalists, and educators must become more intentional about the language they use. It is not pedantic to insist on accurate terminology. It is strategic.<\/span><\/p>\n If we care about truth \u2014 and about the safety and legitimacy of the Jewish people \u2014 we cannot afford to keep speaking in our adversaries\u2019 vocabulary. In every generation, Jews have had to push back against efforts to write us out of our own story. Today, that effort happens with hashtags, slogans, and selective \u201chuman rights\u201d language, as much as with bullets and rockets.<\/span><\/p>\n We do not have to accept a dictionary written by those who want to annihilate us. We can tell the truth plainly: Jews are indigenous to the Land of Israel, and we will not surrender that reality to anyone\u2019s branding campaign \u2014 no matter how sophisticated their propaganda might be.<\/span><\/p>\n David E. Firester<\/strong>, Ph.D., is the Founder and CEO of TRAC Intelligence, LLC, and the author of Failure to Adapt: How Strategic Blindness Undermines Intelligence, Warfare, and Perception (2025).<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n Zawarto\u015b\u0107 publikowanych artyku\u0142\u00f3w i materia\u0142\u00f3w nie reprezentuje pogl\u0105d\u00f3w ani opinii Reunion’68,<\/em> Stop Letting Israel\u2019s Enemies Write the Dictionary David E. Firester The Western Wall and Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Photo: Wikimedia Commons. When people chant \u201cFrom the river to the sea,\u201d they pair it with familiar phrases: \u201cPalestinian\u201d land, \u201coccupied Palestinian territories,\u201d \u201cindigenous Palestinians,\u201d and \u201csettler-colonial Jews.\u201d Most people argue about the slogans and maps. Far […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[33,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126437"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=126437"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126437\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":126531,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126437\/revisions\/126531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=126437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=126437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=126437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n![](\"https:\/\/www.algemeiner.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/westernwallandtemplemount-2.jpg\")
The Western Wall and Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\nHow \u201coccupied Palestinian territories\u201d rewrites history<\/strong><\/h4>\n
From the seminar room to the street<\/strong><\/h4>\n
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